Dreamy 'Noche de Música' launches Austin Opera's Hispanic arts series

The audience was right there to help.

When operatic bass Ricardo Ceballos and San Antonio-based mariachi group Trío Chapultepec diverged on the verses of Tomás Méndez's 1961 "Paloma Negra," Ceballos raised his hands.

Smiling widely at the onlookers on the hillside above Moody Amphitheater, he said: "Let's try that again."

The audience roared their approval. Then, magically, a large number of them sang the correct verse right along with Ceballos.

It was that kind of evening, as Austin Opera, through its cutting-edge Opera ATX program, launched its well-funded adventure into Hispanic culture with "Bella Noche de Música" before a large crowd in Waterloo Park.

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This was not a stand-alone concert, but rather a preview of things to come. Austin Opera has already planned a series of fully-staged operas, workshops and other efforts, meant in part to engage the Hispanic community more rigorously, but also to develop more Spanish language operas, similar to new programs at the Blanton Museum of Art, which is dedicating galleries to a vast collection of Chicano and Latino art.

The audience played a major role throughout "Bella Noche de Música."

They listened with rapt attention, then responded with grateful applause to a series of Italian and French arias — not Spanish, but at least in related Romance languages — rendered exquisitely by three artists from the Ópera de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, as well as Austin's own mezzo-soprano Claudia Chapa, a University of Texas graduate and curator for Hispanic and Latinx programming for the local company.

Early in the show, when Trío Chapultepec first appeared alongside the Austin Opera Orchestra, the real cheering began. Happily, the audience whooped, whistled, sang and clapped along with the mariachi songs and other tunes from the night's program.

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Austin classical guitarist Arnold Yzaguirre and the plush-sounding orchestra, led by Timothy Myers, principal conductor and artistic advisor for the company, were every bit as dazzling as bass Ceballos, mezzo Chapa, soprano Génesis Moreno and tenor Jorge Echeagaray.

Chapa and Moreno are particularly deft actors in concert as well as interpreters of the music. Echeagaray, whose sound flows like an unforced fountain through his figure, ascended to a particular high point with Mexican composer Agustín Lara's 1932 "Granada."

Since just about every tenor during the past 90 years has gambled his voice on this valentine to the Spanish city of Granada, it was gratifying to hear it sung to near perfection.

The dreamy evening was recorded by Austin PBS in order to distribute nationwide to public TV stations.

What's next for the Opera ATX program?

As so often is the case, the idea for Austin Opera's large-scale and ongoing Hispanic programs would have gone nowhere without enlightened donors.

In 2022, super-donors Sarah and Ernest Butler gave $3.3 million to get the ball rolling. Perhaps as importantly for this concert, the Moody Foundation made it possible to give away most of the tickets.

Next season, with that Butler backing in hand, Austin Opera will produce "Cruzar La Cara De La Luna," with music and lyrics by José “Pepe” Martínez and Leonard Foglia. It also happens to be the first mariachi opera.

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In order to further expand the operatic canon in Spanish, a new residency will provide workshopping space for composers and librettists to advance projects that will ultimately extend the scope of operatic storytelling.

“Opera ATX has given us a glimpse of the many ways in which the operatic experience can evolve to reach more people,” opera general director and CEO Annie Burridge said in a statement. “Through immersive experiences, unexpected performance sites and genre-defying works, we’ve been able to engage an entirely new group of experience-seeking Austinites. The Opera ATX Residency for Latinx Creatives will serve as an important next step in supporting the creative teams responsible for driving these works and will ensure that our storytelling reflects the community that we serve.”

Another new Hispanic arts venture for Austin

Austin Opera is not the only major local arts company to have launched a big drive to excel at Hispanic arts recently.

UT's Blanton Museum of Art just opened two new galleries dedicated to Latino art as part of a larger initiative to expand its focus on art by Latino artists. This was made possible in part by a gift and purchase of more than 5,000 artworks from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection, one of the largest private stashes of Chicano and Latino art.

The first artworks to be displayed in these galleries spotlight portraits by Chicana and Chicano artists working in a range of media.

The Blanton, by the way, has just hired Claudia Zapata, who has worked at UCLA and Smithsonian American Art Museum, as the museum’s first associate curator of Latino art. Zapata will program these galleries, as well as lead the effort to catalogue, document and digitize works from the Cárdenas/Garcia collection, after joining the Austin museum's staff in July.

"Cara a Cara / Face to Face: Portraits by Chicano Artists from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection" can be seen at the Blanton through Sept. 23. For more information, go to blantonmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 'Noche de Música" propels Austin Opera's Hispanic arts project